A Recent Georgia Peonage Case mitted
by accepting money to sup
press a prosecution, the Court' said in part: — “It is said that under the law of Georgia that where a laborer has re ceived advances and fails to work, or, I believe, to use the expression ‘abandon
the crop,’ an arrest is proper. Can it be fairly insisted that these people had abandoned their crop? Is a crop aban doned because it is grassy, and because the plowman on more than one occasion
is seen to sleep in the daytime? Do you recall Sidney Lanier’s poem, ‘We are
mightily in the grass’?
The proper
corrective for that is the eye of the master, and according to the testimony
of_;Dupree, he did not go to the field for two weeks at a time. And where is the proof of abandonment? But if they did abandon the crop, I now sol emnly, in the performance of my duty as a judge of the United States courts, and
in obedience to the direct mandate of
529
it is constantly done in the superior courts. Surely not with the assent of the judges of those elevated and most important tribunals. The fruits of the crime belong to the public and not to individuals.
If Clyde and Maud com
mitted burglary, the people of Georgia were entitled to the labors of the one on the public roads, and of the other on the
prison farm.
If they committed cheat
ing and swindling, likewise the fruits
of their labor belonged to the people of Pulaski County and not to Dupree. This whole transaction is utterly ab horrent to law, and if, as claimed, it is constantly done, the investigation here
will at least inform the judiciary and the people of Georgia of how the public by private, and as we have seen criminal
graft, is being deprived of its right to the application of the labor of criminals to the public welfare. . . . "You should try this case, gentlemen, with the same conscientious carefulness,
the Supreme Court of the United States,
the same unswerving integrity as if a
the final arbiter of disputed questions
manly young farmer, with his Saxon blood mantling his cheeks, his pride of
under our Constitution and laws, declare to you that the labor law of Georgia which makes the laboring class of our people, black and white, amenable to
penalties and procedures which are not imposed on people engaged in other ‘ occupations, is unconstitutionally null and void, and is no defense to an arrest
sought to be justified thereby, for such abandonment. “But if the labor law of Georgia was of force, it was not observed. There is no provision in the law which authorizes
a settlement of criminal cases thereunder for the benefit of private parties. An attorney for the defense has stated that
race gleaming through his clear eyes, and his lovely young wife had been the peons save these two humble Africans. They
are perhaps the very least of God's poor unfortunate creatures, but has not the Blessed Master said to us ‘even as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my disciples, ye have done it unto me’?
“Remember that your dear-sighted countrymen, and that the all-seeing eye which in the exquisite metaphor of the Scripture we are told watches the sparrows as they fall, is regarding your action."
